May 2014

05/29/2014

As part of “The New Language of Light” theme at this year’s LIGHTFAIR International Show in Las Vegas June 1-5, visitors to the Echelon booth can see demonstrations of some of the latest technology in both outdoor and indoor lighting.

Highlights will include:

Echelon will showcase its ‘Follow-me’ streetlighting solution, which incorporates motion sensors into streetlight networks to boost both safety and energy efficiency on less-traveled roads and in large parking areas.

Proving that it’s no longer necessary to choose between wired and wireless lighting control—or to struggle to manage the two media separately—Echelon will show a mixture of wired and wireless luminaires and sensors from multiple suppliers connected and interoperating on a single, open-standards-based Echelon control network.

Echelon and Xicato will exhibit a proof of concept (PoC) for Indoor Lighting 2.0: the convergence of networking, building automation, and lighting technologies. Based on Xicato’s new XIM intelligent Internet of Lights platform and powered by upcoming Echelon DC voltage control systems, the PoC reveals how the Industrial Internet of Things can become a reality in professionally lit spaces—providing an ‘Internet of Lighting’ solution.

Live presentations in the Echelon booth include:

Tuesday, June 3 – 11:00 am to 11:20 am: What standards are important in outdoor lighting control, presented by Ron Bernstein, representative for the Municipal Street Lighting Standard Organization

Tuesday, June 3 – 1:30 pm to 1:50 pm: How adding LED lights and controls can greatly reduce energy costs while increasing public safety, presented by Echelon streetlighting experts

Wednesday, June 4 – 11:00 am to 11:20 am: The Internet of Things meets the Internet of Lights, by LED lighting expert Gerard Harbers, CTO of Xicato

Wednesday, June 4 – 1:30 pm to 1:50 pm: What to look for in a control solution from a vendor, presented byEchelon streetlighting experts

Echelon will be in booth #956 at LIGHTFAIR International, being held from June 1-5 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

05/28/2014

In part 2 of our discussion with Loring Wirbel, senior analyst at The Linley Group and senior editor of Networking Report, we talk about the evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ecosystem and both hindrances and opportunities in this market space. Don’t miss part 1 of our conversation, which covers the how, when, and why of IP addressability and IIoT adoption in industrial markets.

Wendy Toth: How is the IIoT ecosystem influencing broader IT operations?

Loring Wirbel: The distinctions between ‘mission-critical’ and ‘business-critical’ requirements are disappearing, as applications like security, HVAC control, and factory floor management come under datacenter control.

To datacenter managers, industrial applications are just more modules to add to the larger datacenter environment. The Achilles heel right now is software. Simplified Linux and Windows-based shell management provide nowhere near the software visibility required for IIoT control.

Industrial applications have industrial-grade criteria such as real-time operating systems and full redundancy for fault tolerance. Because these industrial applications can’t afford to get sloppier, it means that as industrial applications come under datacenter control, the entire datacenter itself is becoming hardened. Increasingly, industrial and real-time standards—i.e., mission-critical standards—are becoming the norm rather than specialized cases.

TOTH: What are some of the hindrances remaining for broader IIoT adoption?

WIRBEL: From a technology perspective, we’re most of the way there, with no significant technological hurdles standing in the way.

The hindrances are more about people choosing when they want to move to a new technology. Industrial markets aren’t going to suddenly adopt IP and Ethernet just because ‘everyone’ is using them. Any changes need to make sense functionally, from the perspective of saving time or money or to provide other specific benefits.

The challenge for the IIoT is to shrink these islands of cultural resistance and to convey the advantages of moving to common protocols.

TOTH: Do you have any advice for those who resist moving to the IIoT?

WIRBEL: They have to realize that the war is over, and the game has been won! IP and Ethernet are the future, and digging in your heels and being stubborn isn’t going to change that fact. It’s worth pointing out that from the very dawn of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee had a vision for IP addresses everywhere.

But this inevitability doesn’t mean that industries have to abandon their own market-specific protocols. That’s where protocol-agnostic IP-based solutions like Echelon’s become important. These solutions provide bridges to that unified view of the universe.

As with every technology transition, some will get there faster and some will lag behind. For the IIoT, things like full integration of the supply chain into the IIoT will take a bit longer. But it’s all about starting with baby steps.

TOTH: How should industrial companies be thinking about security in the context of the IIoT?

WIRBEL: An ongoing debate in the industry has been about who has responsibility for security in this hyperconnected world: security experts or companies like Echelon that are providing building blocks for the IIoT? It’s a tough question, because you never know at what layer security will be effective. For a long time, there was an assumption that every security mechanism provided had to operate at all seven layers of the OSI protocol stack, at the same time.

But more recently, people are realizing that individual building-block companies might not have to provide comprehensive security under their own label. Instead, security is more likely to be delivered through business relationships and alliances. Companies providing solutions higher in the protocol stack could join groups or partner with companies working at the lower layers. Organizations such as the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) can outline ‘suggested implementations’ that define the most obvious and cost-effective ways to provide security for a particular application, so that everyone doesn’t have to define it themselves every time.

TOTH: Another area of debate in the IoT world is the distinctions between the industrial and the consumer IoT. How do you view this?

WIRBEL: The border between the two is moving inside the enterprise datacenter, which means that eventually the consumer and industrial IoT will be less separate.

Even before the IoT terminology emerged, there has long been a segmented realm of control networking that’s part of datacenter server virtualization. Virtualized real-time cores are managed by IT as specific software modules within the enterprise for embedded control.

From the other direction, consumer IoT applications can be ‘industrialized’ and made fully fault tolerant with specialized real-time kernels. Right now, consumer companies are buying those kernels to embed into their applications. But in the future, the kernels will be part of normal enterprise datacenters.

I always like to remind people that the consumer IoT has its roots in traditional embedded control, which has been honed in traditional industrial markets. Those who have grown up in an IP-centric world would do well to remember that the industrial world has been doing what we now call the IoT for decades, and often at levels of reliability and real-time performance that consumer applications can’t match.

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

05/22/2014

In part 3 of our discussion with Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital, the first venture capital fund focused exclusively on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we talk about the IIoT landscape and what stage it’s in. See part 1 of our conversation, which talked about the differences between the consumer and industrial Internet of Things (IoT), and part 2, which delved into some IIoT misconceptions and challenges. And stay tuned for further highlights of our conversation with Scott, covering opportunities and who’s succeeding in this emerging industry, as well as what to expect from the 2014 McRock IIoT Symposium.

Wendy Toth: It seems like sometime in 2013, everyone just woke up and started getting excited about the IIoT. But in other ways, it seems like it’s been around forever. What stage are we at with the IIoT?

Scott MacDonald: There are lots of industrial devices and pieces of equipment that have had sensors put into them for years. Now, the amount of data they can capture is getting greater, and sensors are getting cheaper. Plus, we can do cheaper compute power in the cloud.

These days, it’s not just IBM that can crunch big numbers. Little companies can crunch big numbers, too. This opens up the world to the IoT and IIoT, but we’re still in the early days of the revolution. Where are we in the game of big data and the IIoT? We’re probably still in the first inning, but the game has definitely started.

TOTH: You often mention cloud computing in conjunction with the IIoT. Can you talk some more about that relationship?

MACDONALD: It bears repeating that people simply don’t understand the magnitude and importance of cloud computing.

Industrial companies like Shell have already deployed a trillion sensors for IIoT applications. For instance, they have fibre optic sensors in wells gathering data to do things like predict the remaining service life of a well. They’re creating huge amounts of data, petabytes of data. They had to go into the Amazon virtual private cloud to store the data, and now they’re figuring out how to manipulate it.

TOTH: What do you think about the Industrial Internet Consortium, founded by Cisco, IBM, GE, Intel, and AT&T?

MACDONALD: The consortium is a signpost along the road indicating there’s sufficient critical mass to actually form an IIoT consortium. The fact that it exists shows that there’s an evolution, a critical mass within the industry.

It’s too soon to tell if the consortium will succeed in its objectives, but I do know that it’s a good thing that it exists. It will bring attention to regulatory issues and be a place for thought leadership.

I hope it gets a wide variety of members: large corporations, small startups, industry players that have a vested interest in the IIoT. A consortium of this type is most useful when it has a range of different types of members.

TOTH: In most discussions of the IIoT, it’s the huge players that get mentioned. How is the broader ecosystem of the IIoT shaping up?

MACDONALD: Overall, not too many firms really understand the IIoT space. Still, there’s a lot happening at multiple tiers of the market.

At the top tier of the ecosystem, the big corporates really understand that the world is changing and that businesses are being augmented by the IIoT trend. They’re excited and engaged and they’re finding their positions in the market. For instance, Cisco is thinking about how to connect literally everything to the internet; GE is making big iron; IBM is doing all kinds of things with compute power; and Echelon is making specialized chips for providing reliable, cost-effective, flexible wired IP connectivity for communities of devices in the IIoT.

Echelon has a long history in the IIoT space, with Silicon Valley roots and founded on the premise of connecting any device to a network. Now that the IIoT ecosystem is developing and catching up with that vision, Echelon is well positioned in a number of IIoT areas.

At the other end are entrepreneurs building companies to solve particular technology problems. To give one quick example, one of the companies we are involved with is Pure Technologies, which does fibre optic and sensor-based leak detection for all kinds of pipelines. They have solutions for any buried infrastructure: water, oil, gas. They’re finding leaks and monitoring in real time for potential leaks in pipelines that are expensive and difficult to access with traditional condition assessment methods.

TOTH: So would you say the IIoT is here to stay as a market category?

MACDONALD: I think the IIoT moniker will stick, as it relates to the whole area of machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, software analytics, and all the value that comes out of it, from non-consumer devices. In the end, it all comes back to taking data and figuring out how to make sense of it, to provide a real pain-point solution for an industrial custome

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

05/15/2014

As part of our discussion with Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital, the first venture capital fund focused exclusively on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we talk about the McRock IIoT Symposium and what to expect from the 2014 event on June 12.

Wendy Toth: McRock Capital has another IIoT Symposium coming up. What is this event all about?

Scott MacDonald: The McRock IIoT Symposium brings together the world’s leading Industrial Internet of Things companies to share knowledge and to highlight solutions and opportunities in the IIoT sector. In one action-packed day, attendees can network with some of the largest corporations and high-growth private companies in the IIoT world.

McRock IIoT Symposium

TOTH: What’s the history of this event?

MACDONALD: The 2014 McRock IIoT Symposium is our third annual event. The first year, we did everything ourselves. As you can imagine with VCs acting as their own conference organizers, let’s just say there was room for improvement! The second year it grew considerably, and this year it’s a real, serious conference with lots of sponsorships and involvement from all the major corporations in the IIoT space.

We’re especially proud of the great cross-section of international corporations that are participating this year. We’ve also got a good mix of North American startups and high-growth private companies, and lots of thought leaders. And of course there are investors like McRock Capital always looking for the next great company to back.

TOTH: What can attendees expect from the 2014 McRock IIoT Symposium?

MACDONALD: A full day packed with keynotes, panels, and company presentations, followed by a networking cocktail party featuring a very special surprise guest speaker. Plus, it’s being held in Montreal in spring, which is one of the best times of year to be in one of the world’s great cities, around the same time as the Grand Prix Formula One Race.

Representatives from companies such as Saudi Aramco, Intel, IBM, Siemens, GE, Cisco, Shell, and a number of exciting high-growth companies such as mnubo, Mtell, and Sight Machine will be able to talk with one another about what they’re doing, what they’re working on, and what needs they have. They can discuss the major opportunities for data gathering and analytics in the digital oilfield, or what the water industry is doing to mitigate water loss and reduce operating costs. Successful IIoT entrepreneurs will also be sharing valuable lessons learned from building their startups and working with large corporations. It’s a chance to advance the whole IIoT area by networking with peers and leaders proficient in and familiar with the entire IIoT landscape, from digital oilfields and grid automation to advanced manufacturing and smart cities.

TOTH: What are the details of the event?

MACDONALD: The 3rd annual McRock IIoT Symposium will be held June 12 in Montreal, Canada. Event sponsors include BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada), Cisco, Comerica Bank, Echelon, EDC (Export Development Canada), Fonds de solidarité FTQ, GE, HT (Hobbs & Towne), and Teralys Capital. Other corporate participants include Deloitte, GM Ventures, Intel Capital, IBM, John Deere, Samsung, Schneider Electric, Shlumberger, Siemens, SNC Lavalin, Telus, and Veolia. The event is invitation-only, so it’s not open for registration—but you can follow news of the event at #IIoT2014. In addition, the event speakers, agenda, and presentations will be available at http://www.mcrockcapital.com/iiot-symposium-2014.html.

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

05/12/2014

In part 1 of our discussion with Loring Wirbel, senior analyst at at The Linley Group and senior editor of Networking Report, we talk about the how, when, and why of IP addressability and IIoT adoption in industrial markets. In part 2 of our conversation, we’ll cover the evolution of the IIoT ecosystem and both hindrances and opportunities in this market space.

Wendy Toth: How do you define the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)?

Loring Wirbel, The Linley Group

Loring Wirbel: I should start by admitting that I think the more general Internet of Things term is mostly meaningless marketing hype, like ‘software-defined networking.’ There are so many ways that embedded IP addresses could be used, from smart dust to very specific purposes, that the term is overkill most of the time. In the consumer world, IoT most often refers to cute ideas looking for a real application.

On the other hand, the Industrial IoT refers to a real realm with well-defined purposes. HVAC, factory floor monitoring, building security, and the like have been using network management and robotics technologies for a long time. What’s new in the IIoT is the IP-addressable infrastructure.

TOTH: How do you see acceptance and adoption of IP addressability in industrial markets?

WIRBEL: Right now, there are islands of IP addressability surrounded by vast oceans of unmanaged stuff. In that sense, the IIoT is probably an 80% untapped market.

There are natural opportunities that arise from the very nature of just-in-time, cradle-to-grave manufacturing, for instance. An end-to-end IP addressable supply chain is still a long way off.

One big advantage of the IIoT over the consumer IoT was highlighted by the pushback on IP addressing among consumers in the wake of the recent NSA revelations. There aren’t the same personal privacy concerns in industrial settings. There’s an inherent assumption that it’s good to have remotely controlled security, temperature, and other functions. There’s far less concern about the ‘dark side’ of ubiquitous connectivity within the IIoT.

TOTH: Which will be a greater factor in IIoT adoption: top-down mandates or bottom-up initiatives?

WIRBEL: Ideally, you want things to bubble up from the bottom, like emergent intelligence. But the barrier is old-style thinking about the installed base of industrial devices. There are so many non-IP networks out there, and many industrial network managers see no reason to move to IP. Realistically, it will probably take corporate mandates to spur adoption, at least in some cases.

The best way to sneak IP past the fuddy-duddies is to offer easy co-existence with legacy network stacks. Even those who resist realize that IP is the future. They might drag their heels, but they know that eventually they’ll have to make their networks IP-compatible.

Echelon is doing the right thing here by providing multiprotocol, multistack models. Large-scale adoption of the IIoT will still take some top-down mandates, but tools such as Echelon’s will make the move more widely palatable.

TOTH: You make it sound like a giant tug-of-war match!

WIRBEL: It’s not just stubborn resistance at work here. Manufacturing supply chains fall apart at their weakest link, and no one wants to be blamed if there’s a product recall due to some failure along the way. New things are risky, and risk is not the friend of industrial processes.

Eventually, everyone will see IP as an advantage, if only to avoid being the last to adopt it. There’s risk in being left too far behind, as well.

TOTH: What will be some of the tipping points for broad IIoT adoption?

WIRBEL: When the early adopters start seeing and talking about the advantages they’re gaining, things will shift. On the consumer side, potentially scary scenarios of automated cars are overcome when people realize the advantage of having your car automatically notify the dealer if the brake pads are getting too worn.

Similarly, on a factory floor, it’s clearly advantageous if you can know immediately if a part or widget is being manufactured out of spec, or if a robot arm is misfiring, or if you can know that a part needs replacing before it shows any signs of failure. In food management and preparation, knowing that a plastic scraper is going bad before it contaminates entire batches of food is of tremendous value.

In these kinds of environments, avoiding mistakes that could trigger recalls is vital. To the extent that IIoT technologies are seen as ways to gain real-time, constant feedback on the minute workings of your industrial environment, they will be embraced.

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

TiEcon 2014, taking place May 16 and 17 in Santa Clara, California, calls the IoT “the next huge wave of growth on the Internet.” McKinsey Global Institute’s ‘Disruptive Technologies’ report predicts the IoT will have as much as a $6 trillion impact on the world economy by 2025, with 50 billion connected devices.

Echelon specializes in connectivity solutions for the portion of the IoT known as the Industrial IoT (IIoT), which is expected to soon surpass the consumer or human IoT in size and economic impact. One of the big challenges in industrial markets, however, is enabling the billion or so existing devices, already connected on various incompatible non-IP networks, to participate in the IIoT.

Echelon’s IzoT™ platform for the IIoT not only supports all the new IP-enabled industrial devices and applications being developed, but also makes it simple and cost-effective for legacy industrial devices to become part of the IIoT. In this way, Echelon provides an important bridge between the old and the new.

TiEcon 2014 is the 21st gathering of one of the largest and longest ongoing conferences focused on entrepreneurship and technology innovation. According to conference organizers, the full-day Internet of Things track “will explore all the major IoT trends and the disruptive opportunities they will create for startup innovation, consumer value and enjoyment, societal benefit, and wealth creation.”

05/05/2014

When the inaugural Internet of Things Developers Conference (IoT DevCon) convenes on May 7-8 in Santa Clara, California, one of the featured speakers will be Echelon Corp. Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Bob Dolin.

“The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has different connectivity requirements than the human or consumer IoT, and it’s important that developers are aware of the differences so they know how to approach the design of IIoT devices and applications,” said Dolin. “Echelon is a pioneer in peer-to-peer device networking and in fundamental IIoT control and connectivity technologies, so I’m looking forward to helping impart some of the expertise we’ve gained to this important audience.”

Within the IoT, the largest segment is made up of industrial applications such as building and industrial automation, lighting, transportation, and the energy grid. These IIoT applications exist in harsh, often unforgiving environments—dirty, dusty, humid, loud, underground, underwater, etc.—that favor more wired connectivity than in the consumer IoT. In addition, the 1 billion or so devices already connected in industrial settings also require no-compromise control, stringent security and reliability, and support for legacy protocols and wiring configurations.

With a goal to “educate the industry on the practical side of bringing products to market and to the Internet” and “help software and system developers understand and tackle the challenges of IoT implementations,” IoT DevCon is chaired by Markus Levy, who is also founder and president of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) and previously a senior analyst at In-Stat/MDR and an editor at EDN magazine.

In this IIoT Talks Dialogue series, Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege builds on questions and answers covered during Echelon’s IIoT Talks with industry luminaries, providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts.

From conversation with Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital:

Question from Echelon: Would you say the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, is here to stay as a market category?

McRock Capital: I think the IIoT moniker will stick, as it relates to the whole area of machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, software analytics, and all the value that comes out of it, from non-consumer devices.

The ‘IIoT,’ meaning industrial devices connected together to monitor and control the real world, has been around under a variety of names for many decades. In fact, Echelon itself has been developing solutions for industrial and commercial connected applications for many years.

Ron Sege, Echelon

What is being anticipated today, and talked about under the new heading of IIoT, is an acceleration of the benefits of deploying connected devices in industrial settings. This is for a variety of technical reasons: The cost of the components to make a connected device has fallen; connectivity, via cellular and wired connections, has become near ubiquitous; and cloud-based analytics platforms can track and analyze data in near-real time. This acceleration is also the result of a very important business reason: Commercial and industrial businesses everywhere face hyper-competition these days, which means they are demanding real-time process optimization for high customer service and low cost. Only connected devices can deliver this benefit.

Given our heritage and our passion, Echelon is excited about the potential of the IIoT market, and we’re pleased that the ‘IIoT’ terminology we initiated has become the accepted way to refer to the important portion of the IoT that’s devoted to industrial applications.

Over the past year, as we’ve refocused our foundational control networking platform toward helping companies migrate toward the IIoT, we’ve visited nearly 100 of our top commercial customers and partners, listening closely to be sure we understand their challenges and opportunities. With more than 110 million Echelon LonWorks and LonTalk nodes shipped into smart grid, smart building, and smart city applications over the years, our customers and partners have a wealth of real-world experience to draw from.

We heard a few things quite consistently. Our customers:

See a big difference between the consumer IoT and the industrial IoT, with the IIoT requiring the highest levels of reliability, scalability, and security

Want to leverage IIoT benefits without having to ‘rip and replace’ the many existing devices already connected to traditional control systems

Are not interested in creating additional versions of their products to support new protocols such as IPv6; in fact, they would like to reduce the number of protocol-, or language-specific models they offer

Value the extremely high reliability of wired solutions such as our Free Topology, but also need wireless connections

Are enthusiastic that Echelon has chosen to apply our deep knowledge of device networking and control, developed over the past 25 year, to this IIoT market segment

The tangible result of our findings is our IzoT™ platform for the IIoT. It is built on IP and supports a number of the historic protocols that connect some 1 billion devices in the world today. It is proven scalable to millions of devices. It is a peer-to-peer distributed system and so can operate at the highest levels of reliability–with or without connectivity to the Internet. It recognizes connected devices and their capabilities so is easily configured and commissioned. And, because it is a complete architecture, it gets designs to market faster and at lower risk.

I encourage you to contact Echelon to learn more about the IzoT platform and how it can help both new and legacy industrial devices participate in the benefits of the growing IIoT market.

You might also like:

IIoT Talks: McRock Capital: Differences Between the Consumer and Industrial Internet of Things

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